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Wednesday, June 15, 2005

An organization mapping exercise

Last night I ran an organizational mapping exercise at the Extreme Tuesday Club. What, you may ask is that?

Well, I learnt the technique from observing Jim Coplien apply it. Jim and Neil Harrison have been running these workshops for some years, their aim was to better understand development organizations and produce the patterns in their book “Organizational Patterns for Agile Software Development.”

Typically they run the workshop with a software development team, at the end of the sessions they have a collection of index cards they can analyze and produce a map of your organization. This map can then guide you through their patterns telling you which patterns your organization is using, which is isn’t using and which it should think about using.

This is a very powerful technique. It will tell you a lot you didn’t know, much that is obvious once it is pointed out and confirm a lot of suspicious various people have. As a tool for change its a great motivator: these guys come in, spend a day with you and can describe you back to yourself.

If you want to improve your software development efforts I strongly recommend getting them to run one of these studies.

Anyway, that is something else.

The sessions I ran with help from Giovanni Asproni and Rachel Davies was not really what Jim and Neil do, it was more inspired by Jim’s workshop. And what we didn’t do was go anywhere near the patterns. In effect, it was a demo of how you might go about mapping the interactions in your team.

So, what did I learn form this?

First thing I learned was that running this in a pub, with people drinking and eating, joining late and leaving early is far from ideal!

Second thing is that the people in the room hadn’t actually worked in a team together. So, we where trying to map an organization that didn’t actually exist. Naturally, each individual had different expectations of what they expected other people to do. The guy playing the “Architect” role had a different understanding of what an Architect would do to the person playing the Customer role.

To make matters more complicated, this was XTC, by definition, the people in the room believed in Agile development, Extreme Programming, Lean Software and all that jazz. Nothing wrong with that in itself but it made things even more complicated. There are few organization which are actually out and out XP, or Lean, or Agile. Everyone has a different take. For example, the person playing the “Project Manager” understood this as an enabler role, more of a coach, while others where expecting him to manage a project.

The other problem we faced was that time was limited – OK, time is always limited but the pub was going to close at 11pm. Having seen the technique used a few times before I knew where time would be wasted so I tried to hurry it along at stages. I probably over did this a little bit but it did allow us to finish in less than 2 hours so leaving time for a discussion.

The discussion that followed was very interesting. We discussed the technique, our companies, our experiences of agile, and how the technique had shown some things that we saw in real life (e.g. a frustrated developer got fed up of project management and testing and decided to talk to the user directly.)

Actually, discussions at XTC are always interesting but I don’t always feel I come away knowing something new. This was different. I got some insights from the exercise - I might write them up in more detail in the next few days or weeks.

The other thing I should say is that although this idea has come from software development its not confined to software development. It could be used to map any organization or process. (Interestingly, a lot of Jim and Neil’s patterns also apply outside of software development.)

Actually, in retrospect, since my objective was just to demonstrate the idea of the technique it may have been better to choose something from outside the software domain, say, getting a car services.

In the middle of the workshop I did have that “O no! Its all gone wrong, I can’t do this” feeling but in the end most people thought it was a great success.

(Who was it who said “In the middle of any change it feels like failure?” – I can’t remember, I think it was a Harvard Business School professor?)

I think I agree with them, it was a success for me because I got to try moderating this technique, it was a success for the participants because they go to see what an organization mapping technique could look like and it was a success for everyone because we did get some insights into the software process.